ZORLUTUNA, Alize

becoming oblique of the world (2015, 4:50)
Thursday August 24, 7:30 pm
291 Lake Shore Boulevard East (just west of Parliament St.)
Presented in partnership with Art Spin and Waterfront Toronto in conjunction with Desire Lines

Saturday June 10, 7:30 pm
Guild Park and Gardens
Presented in partnership with (Un)settled

This installation attempts to create the sensation of misplaced desire; a touch that transgresses appropriate expectations and boundaries—a queer touch. At once strange, enticing and unsettling, this touch hints at disorientation. Sarah Ahmed describes the experience of being queer in the world as a feeling of disorientation, a “becoming oblique of the world”—from which the title of this work derives. To embody desire that has historically been characterized as unnatural, places the queer body at an angle to the norm, not totally askew, but not comfortable either—slightly off kilter. Here, an impossible proximity is made possible through technologies, and yet, these mechanisms further highlight a deep fissure—the space between the queer body and “nature” as it has been mythologized.

Alize Zorlutuna is an interdisciplinary artist who works with installation, video, performance, and material culture, to investigate themes concerning identity, queer sexuality, settler colonial relationships to land, culture and history, as well as labour, intimacy, and technology. Her work aims to activate interstices where seemingly incommensurate elements intersect. Drawing on archival as well as practice-based research, the body and its sensorial capacities are central to her work. Alize lives and works in Toronto.